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Chess with Different Armies. Betza's classic variant where white and black play with different sets of pieces. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Jeremy Good wrote on Mon, Dec 29, 2014 06:31 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
If I haven't done so before, I wish to add my voice to the rousing chorus of praise for this *classic* inspiration (by "The Philosopher" of chess himself, Ralph Betza) which begins to bridge the gap to cv and start the necessary transition from increasingly obsolete (but not dead yet) Eurocentric chess currently undergoing brutal, dark ages under the corrupt auspices of FIDE organization and its kooky real life tyrant of Kalmykia (really casting a very dark and unseemly shadow over the contemporary scene of professional chess and it's really quite a shame that Kasparov didn't manage to succeed Ilyumzhinov but I'm grateful to Garry Kimovich *to whom I wish to give a "shout out" of FULL respect* for trying).

I think it's a fun exercise for chess variant inventors to develop their own CDAs, kind of like a poet to develop his/her own haiku or sonnet. Obviously, it's not essential for poets to adopt "accepted" (but also merely arbitrary and conventional) forms. I encourage cv inventors with time, energy and inclination to do what Aronson, Lawson, Joyce and several others have done and try to come up with their own unique blend of pieces to compete against the ortho-Eurocentric one, e.g., what CDA might employ a GW Duke Falcon? I would LOVE to see such a thing developed and I'm sure some very nice ones could be.

A fun variant design contest would be for CDAs.

I hope to see CDA developed for other variants besides the ortho-eurocentric one such as the Shatranj for Different Armies alluded to by such as Knappen and Joyce and Tripunch for Different Armies as Betza has alluded to (I have recently myself discovered a Tripunch CDA currently in Beta Testing). One hopes to see more classic, exotic, fancier CDAs developed such as those by Knappen, Maxson, Makov, I myself, others and older ones fine-tuned with the guidance of computers such as H.G. Muller has been delving into...